And so our thrilling game of Second Edition D&D comes to an end. I managed to survive my serious case of self-inflicted deadly poison long enough to wander off to do the job, alone, with incomplete information. Josh cast his one spell and had to take a nap. Chris took no actions whatsoever, thereby making him the winner by virtue of being the person to make the fewest number of idiotic blunders.

Also there was something about Jedi and fish people in there? I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention to that stuff.

The D&D seems to have gone over well. We’re currently talking about maybe doing some more of this, perhaps outside of Spoiler Warning. We’ll see.

I listened to the last episode whilst reclining with my eyes closed. I know Knights of the Old Republic very well, so the video doesn’t really add much to experience for me this season. Actually, it was kind of nice. I didn’t see any of Josh’s shenanigans.

I’m amazed that no-one made the “Firaxan shark = shark empoyed by Firaxis” joke previously. It’s the first thing that jumped into my head every time Firaxan sharks were mentioned. Or did I miss it.

Maybe it’s just me.

Also, did anyone ever pay attention to the components of 1st & 2nd edition AD&D spells? I suspect a few people might have pointed out that the spell they wanted to cast only used somatic components if they happened to be silence / gagged for some reason, or other similar circumstances, but that just opens the door to the DM insisting on keeping track of material components rather than just assuming everyone always had them in plentiful supply.

I sometimes suspect the original AD&D rules were designed by someone going “okay, now we need to look at subject X. It needs a die roll – what die haven’t we used for a while? D12? Okay, to do X you have to roll a D12…”

The worst part is that almost all of the components are gags. The idea of sympathetic magic shows up here and there – carrying a little bullseye to cast a spell that improves your accuracy, or a greasy pork rind to make a huge surface slick – but a lot of them are just dumb jokes. Example: Haste requires a piece of black licorice. Which is a laxative. Meaning, having a lot can induce diarrhea, i.e. it “gives you the runs.” That one made it through to 3E (which means it’s probably back for 5E) though I’ve forgotten the other big pun ones.

And yet older editions managed to be even goofier. Gygax at one point released a book describing what the exact verbal and somatic components are for a bunch of cantrips. The one that cleans things is “pretend to be using a dustbuster.” The one that produces a small flame is “pretend you’re holding a lighter.”

According to the just released System Resource Document for D&D 5e, licorice root is indeed the material component for Haste. Along with other throwbacks like rabbit fur for Lightning Bolt (i.e., generating static electricity in your hand).

I’ve seen that first article you linked to before. It’s actually entirely false, due to being about a mistaken premise: in 5e, unless a spell specifically states that it consumes the material component upon casting, the component is not consumed. A wizard only needs a single pearl for Identify, and can re-use it indefinitely.

Now if you want to transpose the subject to 2e D&D, it has more weight. All components are always consumed. However, using components at all is an Optional rule, and the 2e version of Identify besides is just… incredibly stupid. It’s decent roleplaying, but terrible for actually playing the damn game. The spell takes 8 hours to cast, consumes a 100 gp pearl, you only identify a specific property of an item, not the item itself, you only have a 10% chance per level for the attempt to succeed (so your mage needs to be 5th level to have a decent chance of successfully using a 1st level spell), and you get one attempt per level.

Also, Identifying the item requires that the wizard handle it, “Any consequences of this handling fall fully upon the wizard and may end the spell, although the wizard is allowed any applicable saving throw.” So if an item is cursed, the wizard gets hit by it. Yet that’s one of the prime reasons why you would want to Identify items in the first place. Sigh.

Oh, and you don’t learn an exact property of the item even if you succeed. “The item never reveals its exact attack or damage bonuses, although the fact that it has few or many bonuses can be determined.” And if you fail any one of your multiple tries at identifying the item, you can’t attempt to identify that item at all UNTIL YOU GAIN ANOTHER LEVEL.

And the cherry on top of this shit sundae? You lose 8 points of Constitution after casting the spell, and require an hour of rest to gain back a point. So not only do you need to spend 8 hours prepping the spell, you need to spend 8 more hours recovering the spell. If your wizard doesn’t have 8 points of Constitution, they fall unconscious, and require 24 hours of resting to regain their Constitution.

Seriously, the fact that it cost a 100 gp pearl was the least fucked thing about that spell in 2e. I’m usually the guy around here who will defend 2e, but nobody in their right mind will defend that. It fits some of the ancient tropes of fortune tellers and diviners, sure, but it crosses way over the line where it makes the game just un-fun to play.

Also, it costs far less to just hand it to dirt poor peasant and have them swing it around until you have a decent idea of what it does or at least that it’s not cursed in some immediately problematic way. You can give the populace a great fear of magic items to control this, but that gives players something they can exploit to great effect.

3rd ed’s spell component pouch specifically didn’t include any components for free that were noted in the spell description as having a monetary value.

But as for pearl consumption ruining the economy, that’s just standard dnd. The fact that the pearls cost 100gp means they are 100gp’s worth of rare/available. If that makes them too cheap to gather via oyster diving, that just means in dnd’s world there is some alternate way of getting them that results in them costing 100gp.

The real problem is that the XP money curve (a holy thing in 3rd ed) meant that players ended up dealing in ludicrous sums, which required other people to also deal in those sums, because if they didn’t, who would the PCs buy from or sell to?

The economy was required to have the kind of cash the players needed it to have or the game would break. Nevermind that that broke the economy.

The 100gp requirement messes holy hell with the demand curve; pearls of a given quality are much more in demand at 100gp each than at 99gp each.

I think the outcome of that is that literally no pearls are worth less than 100gp, which makes me wonder if the result of cutting a pearl is two pearls (the way that cutting a ruby gets you two or more smaller rubies).

Now we’re finished with the planet that most people regard as their least favorite. I still stand by my view that this planet is better than what people give it credit for, they just get hung up on the underwater section.

To me, this planet is probably my favorite with just one bad part. It shows pretty good political intrigue with the Sith long-term plans to indoctrinate the children to eventually take over the planet. It highlights that the Republic isn’t just a perfect “Big good” with the torture of the prisoner, and the secret kolto harvesting operation.

It’s not just the underwater bit though. Ahto City is irritatingly large. Five zones, with attendant loading screens, and they’re laid out in a line so that if you need to go from one end to the other then you need to traipse all the way through the intervening ones, and most of them don’t have anything in them that you need more than once either so you’re just walking through dead air to get to somewhere.

But it’s not any bigger than, say, the Badlands + Tree Bridges of Kashyyyk, or the deserts of Tatooine. It’s way more compact than those. It’s true that you have to sometimes move from one end to another and a hub would’ve been better, but it’s hardly laborious in comparison to the other planets.

Ahto City is fairly disorienting your first time through. That’s why they have that Republic soldier give you directions to the embassy right after you land. And let’s face it, those directions are non-trivial.

Still, if you check your map frequently you’ll figure things out in fairly short order.

If you do more of the D&D, be sure to capture the complete disregard for consequence and fairness that comes from doing it as a time-filling one-off joke during an underwater section. That gave it a very special quality that I think is what people liked.

Although the lack of fairness in rolling characters (straight 3d6 per stat) was harsh even by AD&D standards. The original rule books had 4 methods for generating characters:

Method 1: roll 4d6 six times and discard the lowest die. rearrange to whatever order you want (so you can put your best score in INT if you want to be a magic user).Method 2: roll 3d6 12 times and keep the best 6 scores for your attributes, arranged in whatever order you want.Method 3: roll 3d6 6 times for each attribute, keeping the highest 1 out of the 6.Method 4 basically roll 12 characters with a straight 3d6 per stat and keep the best character set.

For whatever reason, method 1 was universally used in all the role playing groups I gamed with. It seemed to be the one that everyone gravitated to independently. Perhaps because it involved the least bookkeeping.

EDIT to add : There was another almost universally used rule that after you’d rolled your stats, you could swap them around by decreasing one stat by 2 to raise another by 1.

Depends on what you mean by fairness. 3d6 straight creates the greatest variance, which means one player who gets lucky gets to play a demigod against all the mere mortals. Or the player who gets really unlucky and has to play a complete useless lemon. And the party balance is completely hamstrung by what everyone happens to roll.

It’s fair in the sense that everyone has the same chances at the start – no-one is left out in the cold rolling 2d6 instead ;). But it creates unfairness by having the greatest chance of having great disparity permanently baked into the campaign.

Actually it doesnt.Most of the results will fall somewhere around 10.I mean,just listen to the stats in this session,there was a single 5,out of 18 stats.What you get with 3d6 is basically a typical human,somewhat good in one,maybe two things,somewhat bad in one,maybe two things.No one gets to be a god incarnate unless they get EXTREMELY lucky(one guy in thousands of sessions).Not to mention that if you get extremely unlucky,no one will force you to play that.Youll just chuck it out,and make a new character.

Yes it does, “variance” isn’t abstract, it’s a defined mathematical concept, and 3d6 straight has objectively higher variance than 4d6 drop lowest, roll 12 characters and keep highest, or any of the other methods.

The average group of 3d6 straight characters are going to have greater stat disparity than the average group of 4d6 drop lowest.

What you didnt take into account is that every player gets 6 rolls,and while differences between players stats can be quite high,the total number of points between players usually is pretty similar.

Yes 4d6 gives more uniform results.But while it doesnt change the difference between players by much,it does push everyone into superhuman category,making them all less unique.You no longer get dexterous but weak fighters,dumb but charismatic mages,clumsy but smart thieves,…Especially if you allow for rerolls.

No one is saying that 4d6 drop lowest doesn’t produce higher results than 3d6 straight, so I’m not sure who you’re arguing with by bringing up superhuman characters. My point is that 3d6 is higher variance, which means larger stat disparities between players, and Phill’s point is that a lot of people see stat disparities as unfair.

But straight 3d6 rolls don’t give characters with stat trade-offs like that either. Yes, the stats will vary around the average a bit, but they’re independent of each other – having one stat high doesn’t make it more likely the others will be low.

(Actually, the stats will be slightly negatively correlated with each other in both methods, but that’s because the classes’ stat requirements mean there’s an instance of Berkson’s paradox going on, rather than anything to do with the stat generation method.)

That is very interesting. I did not know that paradox had a name. I came up with something similar as a possible explanation for a weird pattern I saw in some grades that I assigned in a physics class that I taught. This may help me win an argument the next time this comes up.

That said, I don’t think that the stats Rutskarn rolled for the crew qualify for Berkson’s paradox (assuming I understand it correctly). He rolled the stats first, and then they checked to see what classes they could play. The six stats should be completely independent of each other under those circumstances.

Now if you look at a collection of thieves (for instance) then Berkson’s paradox would apply, since the distribution would be contingent on a dexterity of 9 (if I remember my 1rst edition properly) for all members of the group.

I only know of it by browsing through statistical paradoxes on Wikipedia. If you’ve come across the puzzle where you’re asked for the probability that two non-identical siblings are both boys, given that at least one of them is a boy, that’s a special case of this paradox. May I ask what the grade pattern was?

I think it still holds in that case. It’s just that there are two steps, and it only applies after both of them:
1. Roll your stats. Clearly independent at this point.
2. If you apply for at least one class, pick one. Otherwise, reroll. Once rerolling is finished, you only have stat blocks that make at least one class available, and the paradox now applies.

The example with just the Thief class won’t work: all that would happen is that Dex has a higher minimum value, you’d still have independence. You need at least two categories/classes/dimensions for this effect to happen. If you look at Wikipedia’s explanation using a tabular form, the effect happens because you remove one corner of a grid. You can do the same with cubes etc., for three or more categories, but you can’t do it with a one-category table with two cells: removing a cell would still leave you with a grid (of one cell), rather than the L-shaped block that effects the paradox.

What would work is if you just look at the four basic classes: Fighter, Thief, Mage, Cleric. Those require 9 in Str, Dex, Int, or Wis respectively. Therefore, if your stats are high enough to let you choose at least one of these, then those four stats are negatively correlated with each other.

The observed pattern was that female students have lower grades than male students (by around a quarter of a grade point) IF you control for incoming GPA. We would really like to know why.

My hypothesis was that there *could* be some skill set unrelated to STEM classes that affects the distribution of the rest of the GPA differently for males and females, and this causes the distribution of STEM grades to look different when you control for non-STEM gpa. For instance, better writing skills would do this. I have not done anything to validate this hypothesis, so at the moment it is just a guess.

Now that I type that up it does not seem to be exactly the same as Berkson’s paradox, but it is certainly a relative.

I think the thief class by itself should still exhibit the paradox, since any rolls that don’t have 9 dex get tossed (or used as a different class, which for this purpose is the same thing).

As you say, it’s not a case of Berkson. Still interesting though, there are lot of intermediate factors that could have that effect!

I think just looking at thieves will keep independence. Say we only have Str and Dex for stats, and Fighter and Thieves. Say it’s twice as likely we get a high stat than a low stat. Since Str and Dex are independent, I can plot the probabilities as a grid:

If we only look at characters with a high Dex, i.e. just thieves, we just have the left hand side:
aa |
aa |
cc | 2/3 chance of high Str (a out of a and c),
still independent. The Dex stat is larger on average, yes, but that doesn’t imply correlation by itself.

If we look at characters with at least one high stat, i.e. usable characters, we only remove the d block:
aab | High Dex => 2/3 chance of high Str (a out of a and c),
aab | Low Dex => guaranteed high Str (b out of b),
cc | so negative correlation.

Why the fuck would that even be desirable? People with below average or average stats resign themselves to being commoners. If enough people went off to die adventuring that rolling stats with adjustment made a lick of sense there would be nobody bringing in the harvest.

R. H. Junior called this the Darn Good Reason rule. If you don’t have a DGR to think you’ll survive adventuring you don’t. He did it in the form of silly starting equipment because it was a comic, but if you didn’t inherit your uncles ring of invisibility it comes in the form of having at least top 10% stats with an emphasis on those that are useful. And probably a negative correlation on charisma for non-urban adventuring because charismatic people benefit from staying around other people.

4d6 ordered as the player prefers is a far better method for generating characters that have passed the “adventuring is merely risky rather than unmitigated suicide” filter if you actually think randomness in character creation is necessary.

For a game, though, randomness in character creation is fucking stupid. 0 variance methods like point buy or arranging a fixed array are better than any random method. Forget fair. Random characters are like finding out that a game uses a hash of hardware ID numbers to determine what class you have to play the game as and what the difficulty setting you must play it at is. By your utterly useless definition it’s “fair” because it’s random, but it’s not fun and it’s not fair as the term is used colloquially. Only an asshole would publish such a thing and only an idiot would buy it.

Random stats are for NPCs. Rolled stats without a simulated filter are for utterly generic NPCs. The stat distribution within any actual group won’t match the total population stat distribution. 5 str farmers toughen up or get sent to a monestary. 5 wis guards get fired because they don’t notice what they’re supposed to be guarding against. 5 con people die in childhood so you never actually see them unless they suffered stat loss. 3d6 in order forms the assumed population statistics for calibrating the meaning of stats that don’t have something as straight forward as a lift/carry weight table, but you should never actually use them.

Well that was a nice side effect, them doing D&D is something that’s always been a cool idea that they just haven’t followed up on completely. (With exeption to the one off “Tales from the Tabletop” ruts did with Josh and a few others.)

Not watched this episode yet, but I am all for the SW crew doing more D&D. Knowing that everyone has limited time, maybe Ruts could run the crew through one of the old module series. Do one, if it goes well, do the next.

I vote for more D&D! Other RPGs could be good as well, but D&D is the best known and most-adapted-to-video-games RPG out there. Personally, I’ve never played Paranoia or Everyone is Josh/John. It can be hard enough to follow an audio-only RPG play through, without using a lesser-known rule set and a setting based on lesser known tropes. Just my 2 cents (adjusted for inflation.)

It’s interesting that they don’t directly tell you what the Progenitor’s deal is. All you get are a couple lines before the other Selkath shuts off the exposition, and since the EU never bothered with the Selkath, that’s all there is. Most stories would really try to hit you with some of that ancient legend or something, but not this one. It’s different.

It would follow that kolto and this whole progenitor business would have something to do with the precursors forerunners protheans ancient aliens that left the star maps, the same as with Kashyyyk’s amazingly fertile and mineral-rich soil and Tatooine being destroyed and left a wasteland, but that’s about the extent you can speculate.

As someone who is just getting into tabletop gaming, particularly d&d, i’d love more d&d stuff. It was hilarious. Even if it were a more serious post or something about d&d that’d be cool. I literally have my first ever session tonight. Pretty excited. Always wanted to play, but vpuld never find anyone who wanted to and couldn’t afford the books. Great episode.

Well, I learned something new today. I’ve never seen that particular resolution to the stowaway quest before.

For those who may be curious about what happens if you poison the giant shark, most of the time the Selkath in their great and terrible anger . . . banish you from the planet, permanently. You can land in the hangar, but the hangar doors will not open and you can never do anything on Manaan ever again. To be fair, if you say the stupidest and most provocative thing at every opportunity, I think that the Selkath might actually execute you. And I know that if you choose the right dialogue options you can actually blackmail the Selkath into . . . not banishing you from Manaan.

Of course, from the player’s perspective banishment is not much of a punishment. The only real consequence is that you can’t finish any remaining Manaan-based sidequests. So I suppose you might miss out on the rewards for the Genoharadan quests, which are fairly good, but the Genoharadan quest line was originally DLC (for the XBOX version of the game) and is by no means essential.

So, the progenitor of the Selkath species is still alive, and the Selkath apparently have legends about it.

…How long is their evolutionary history anyway? I mean, the shark may very well be immortal, but imagine if humanity was still having legends about an eight million-year old gorilla (yes I know humanity didn’t evolve from gorillas, just bear with me here) in the heart of Zaire or something. It would literally be older than our ability to *have* legends by several orders of magnitude. We’d be spread across the globe long before we’d be able to make legends about it. How the heck would you pass something like that down?

Africans would create legends about the gorilla based on what contact they had, and if there was some convincing evidence and, more importantly, determined proselytising, the legends could spread to the whole planet, at least to the extent that any developed and connected city would be aware of them. Of course, most species in Star Wars are monocultures, so apparently spread isn’t an issue, they just have to have had significant contact within the last ten thousands years and they can get lucky making up the details.

Well, the Selkath were employed as slaves by the Infinite Empire something like 25,000 years ago. So Selkath evolutionary history is longer than that, I guess. Actual modern or near-modern humans, if I remember aright, have been around at least twice that long.

As for Sasha the Mandalorian capture leaving the ship…out of all the places you can visit, Manaan is probably the safest for a runaway kid to end up wandering. In my first game, she ending up leaving the ship on Kashyyyk-in the middle of an anti-human slave uprising. Even if she wasn’t immediately shot dead when she left the landing port, it seems unlikely she would have many options. Poor kid.

Even on Tattooine or Korriban, she could have at least found refuge somewhere in the spaceport towns.

I actually arrived at this site after the era of Roleplay stuff had ended but even I’d absolutely love to hear you guys do some Tabletop stuff. Frankly I was much more interested in the 2.0 shenanigans than the KOTOR.